You have to admit though. Those are some decent crash screens. Not unlike the screens you'd see when pulling out a Atari 2600 game cartridge with the power on. Hey wait, the crashes themselves look better than atari 2600 games. Oh no!

>You have to admit though. Those are some decent crash screens. Not unlike the screens you'd see when pulling>out a Atari 2600 game cartridge with the power on. Hey wait, the crashes themselves look better than atari>2600 games. Oh no!

Steve Ballmer is led onto a stage in chains and shackles. The audience looks aghast at the hideous creature. Although he is clearly dangerous, he seems to be pacified by a rather large contingent of middle managers.

On the other side of the stage, Bill Gates is demonstrating the XBOX 360. The press is eating it up. The audience is on its feet. Suddenly the XBOX bursts into flames. Ballmer sees the flames and reacts with a violent primal rage. He explodes from his restraints with the strength of a hundred men. Rampaging through the audience, he effortlessly tears up rows of chairs, heaving them in every direction. Then, he turns on the people. He grabs each person by their ankles, turns them upside-down, and shakes the money out of their pockets. Bill Gates is speaking over the public adress "Please remain calm. The situation is under control." It's of no use. Panic has ensued.

By this time, Ballmer is stomping around the arena, masturbating wildly, and crushing everyone and everything. Few survive. Finally, sweat-drenched and exhausted, he returns to the stage where he cuddles with his harem of developers.

At least this will solve M$'s supply problem after the news makes the news and front pages. Remaining early adopters will want to wait until M$ announces its take on things before thinking of buying again.

On the XBox-360 poll, my answer was Never / X-Mas 2006. Launch prices are too high, I do not care about the coolness factor of having 0-dayz new stuff and I had doubts about how well the initial hardware would work. Quitting the bleeding-edge to stick with mature mainstream stuff has saved me quite a bit of cash and trouble, I'll stick to that.

apparently team xbox started a poll. Very small sample but 15% of xbox 360's are freezing. It will be interesting to see what happens to the percentage as the sample grows.

Dude, if I had an X-Box and it was working properly, why would I be answering polls on some "team X-Box" site??? I'd be spending every waking hour (outside of work) playing Call of Duty 2 or something.

Frankly, I'm stunned that their number isn't far closer to 100%.

The real number of X-Boxes with problems is something we won't know for a couple weeks yet. It could be everybody, it could be a handful of loudmouths (or Sony astroturfers) trying to turn their bad experience into the next big consumer "crisis", a la the iPod battery "issues." Let's not get ahead of ourselves. If they screwed up the launch, we'll have plenty of time for MS-bashing fun when the dust settles.

"Dude, if I had an X-Box and it was working properly, why would I be answering polls on some "team X-Box" site??? I'd be spending every waking hour (outside of work) playing Call of Duty 2 or something. Frankly, I'm stunned that their number isn't far closer to 100%."

well, the real number is closer to 0.0001%, but apparently a few people did take a second to go on the forums to brag about their working xbox360 which is why it's only 85%. Think it's Cartman syndrome: got a cool new toy = gotta brag about it.

The people who paid $300+ for a non-working xbox360 have nothing better to do than to bitch about it online so that's where the 15% came from.

Just the fact that it's only 15% means there's very, very few people with broken xbox360s because when shit breaks the first thing the internet community does is bitch about it 24/7. If there was truly a lot of busted xbox360s out there then this number would be 100%.

A defect caused by a poor design, and only in the early models. Sounds familiar! A moving part was made of plastic and it wore a groove down in it over time. This messed up the lens alignment as it wasn't hitting the disk at 90 degrees. Turning it upsidedown meant that that gravity did the same job as the plastic sled. You could fix it by filling the groove with glue or some other filler to level it off.

My main point: How many of the people with problems have the machine sitting on a carpet? I see this at friends places all the time. Most devices have vent holes on the bottom and passive ventilation is essential from bottom to top. If you place it on a carpet, you cover half of the vents and remove most of the airflow. If the xbox 360 is already a hot potato, this could even lead to a fire hazard. However, it should not be crashing. If it's overheating, the BIOS should notice and shutdown long before you start to get random glitches.

If you don't have a desk to put it on, put a hard-back book between it and the floor.

It's a games console... it's supposed to be in the living room. If the designers couldn't figure out that bit and left it with a flaw where it didn't work in a normal living room, they deserve to be shot.

Maybe, but it won't be. It'll be on kids' bedroom floors, or buried under a pile of DVDs and stinky T-shirts in some student's dorm room, because those sort of people make up a large part of its market. To design the product without taking into account the conditions in which it will typically be used, whether it's advisable to use it like that or not, would be very silly, and I'm sure the product designers had more sense than to overlook something so obvious in testing.

okay,Family of bears crashes(...for the night? crashes the party?) Anyway every camper knows to shut the flaps against the bears.

Pope is accused of defecating in forested areasHey, when you gotta' go, you gotta' go. Nature calls.

But this?Microsoft discovered to be CatholicI call bullshit - don't let the tithing (MS tax) / real charity done by the Foundation throw you off. No way Gates would let his workers wear his crucified corpse around their neck. (Though I'm sure Balmer has thought of it...)

Microsoft product crashes
I predicted in/. forum that XBox will be very unstable, not because it is designed by MS but because it is nightmare for debugging. You have to make 3 threads application (not 4, not 2) and sync all objects they share. Combine it with complicated interactions of objects in any game, which makes creation of auto-test scripts impossible and default gaming language, C++, which is very uneasy to debug for Multiple threads (compared to say, Java) and they hardly could do any better than this. Cell is designed in much better way, multiple threads (SPUs) are used by low level liberaries (well debugged) but main gaming/engine app. is still single-threadded and therefore easy to debug and stable.

This article [theinquirer.net] has responses from a few game devs stating that their launch titles are multi-threaded and a M$ threading person said: "Six months ago, we had only looked at a handful of games. Most of those games were single-threaded. Today, we've evaluated most launch titles and the majority are using multiple threads."

Yep. I've done this type of work and it's possible for it to not be a big deal -- provided that the developers stick to a robust set of patterns and protocols for interacting with the DSP compute hardware. For sanity's sake, all of the sync code should be wrapped up into frameworks so that various sub-teams never end up wandering off and generating buggy one-off low-level synchronization code. Devs coding for the specialized hardware (DSP/Cell) write to interfaces that are clean and purely single-threaded. Clients on the main hardware threads never need to screw around with low-level sync code. The framework itself can be instrumented to assist in finding and debugging any odd concurrency issues that come up, but for the most part a well-designed framework allieviates a lot of annoying concurrency bugs in the first place. When bugs are found they get quashed once and for-all in the framework, instead of being distributed willy-nilly (and sometimes in non-obvious ways) around the system.

To folks looking for further reading, I suggest starting with Pattern Oriented Software Architecture, Vol 2: Patterns for Concurrent and Networked Objects by Douglas Schmidt, et. al. A number of these patterns are also available as papers from Schmidt's website -- see Google. I also recommend checking out the Future(s) pattern, not covered in POSA2. The idea is to have an asynchronous operation return a Future object that represents the result of the async computation. When the result in needed, the object either returns it (if the async computation is done) or blocks (if the async computation isn't done). This allows both batching of multiple parallel async activities, as well as result/input dependency management. A somewhat simple example:

The nice thing is that the work requests (here, loading or transforming data) can (potentially) all run in parallel. Note that LoadTexture, LoadModel, and Transform all return instantly -- we'll only wait for a result when it's called for, and we only wait if the result is not already available.

Stop me if you heard this one...
Catholic: Who do you confess your sins to?Baptist: God. So, who do you confess your sins to?Catholic: A priest.Baptist: I heard about that, who does the priest confess his sins to?Catholic: A bishop.Baptist: Who does the bishop confess his sins to?Catholic: A cardinal.Baptist: Who does the cardinal confess his sins to?Catholic: The Pope.Baptist: Okay, who does the Pope confess his sins to?Catholic: God.Baptist: Oh, so the Pope is a Baptist!

Does anyone know if these things are upgradable? or what the process is? Microsoft has a history of being first to markwt with buggy software. In the past it has been a strategy which has worked for them. Still, I long for the days of cartridges. Just reminissing - please don't flame me. But do answer if you know about upgradability/

Um MSFT has gotten away with selling buggy software because they were easily upgradable. Considering how one has to upgrade windows and he fact you need third party software to install all the updates smoothly before you go online. With this MSFT is going to have to either force users to hook it up to the Net(at extra cost probably), or download and burn ISO files.

yea MSFT is going to learn the hard way selling cheap hardware is a lot different than selling cheap software.

They did (at least with the first Xbox) make it easy to upgrade. I'm not sure how that will work with the Xbox 360s that don't have hard drives. When Halo 2 first came out it had a bug that caused it to stretch images on certain HDTV widescreens and you had to have Xbox Live to download the patch which fixed it. Lots of people were pretty mad there for a few weeks (including myself because true 16:9 was touted as a big new cool feature).

I'm honestly not sure if it's upgradeable or not; but even if it is, you have to realize that it's definitely NOT the same kind of market.

I guess after years of working with Microsoft operating systems and just assuming that Windows was part of the computer, many users have grown to accept crashing and the need to run periodic upgrades. However, in the "black box" market, people are much less forgiving of programming bugs that lead to crashes and are much less likely to upgrade to newer firmware versions.

I work with embedded systems at my job and it's known by all programmers that our firmware needs to be as close to bug free as we can possibly get it. Think of a little "black box" that controls your printer (a print server), for example. How would you feel if you had to reset some idiot box a couple times a day for no reason? For everybody I've ever worked with, it's entirely unacceptable and it's an almost certainty that the IT managers would be replacing the box with another brand as soon as possible.

I don't know about you, but it's bad enough for me --and most people-- when my computer crashes. I would be pretty upset, however, if my game console crashed after hours of game play to complete a mission.

So half a dozen out of the hundreds of thousands of new Xbox 360 owners are having problems. Why does Slashdot have to state "Xbox 360 Very Unstable"? I've had bad installs of Linux too. Would we see the headline on Slashdot "Linux Very Unstable" too?

This is normal. With the massive number of parts in the Xbox 360, it's to be expected that some are defective on a few units. Microsoft will give them a replacement. Move along, nothing to see here.

somebody mod the parent post up.At work we get large quantities of hard drives from various manufacturers and out of every batch we usually get 1 or 2 that just will not spin up, or have other errors prohibiting their use.

Considering the condition of some of the boxes I've seen people carrying out of the stores, it's no wonder there isn't a few machines that have had parts wriggle free.

They probably make sure the system boots to the dashboard and then send it on for packaging.

I seriously doubt that ANY video game console company does burn-in testing for 24-hours before shipping the unit to market. The costs would be (more) astronomical.

Well, I don't know about you, but if I buy systems with a *pre-installed* OS, no matter whether it's Linux or Windows or OS X or Plan 9 or whatever, I expect the system to be in a usable state. There is such a thing as quality control.This is even more true when you consider that a console is not like a PC - from a customer's point of view at least, it's much closer to any regular home appliance. To give an example, if you bought a new toaster and it didn't work, would you then say "that's OK, it might not

Things like toasters and other appliances do come defective once in a while. This is not news. If your toaster is defective then you take it back and they replace it. There is nothing (yet) to indicate this Xbox problem is widespread. Slashdot just wanted to post this 'story' because they wanted to be able to laugh at MS and pretend the evil giant was on its knees because all Xbox 360s are defective. MS has it coming once in a while and deserves to be bashed but in this instance it's the MS-haters who

Slashdot just wanted to post this 'story' because they wanted to be able to laugh at MS and pretend the evil giant was on its knees because all Xbox 360s are defective. MS has it coming once in a while and deserves to be bashed but in this instance it's the MS-haters who sound like drooling fanboys.

I think that's a tad unfair. It's a 'story' because the 360 is hyped right now and anything that happens surrounding it is news. We've had months of rumour, speculation and hype. It hardly makes sense to start pointing the finger at 'MS-haters' when a story starts emerging showing the 360 in an unflattering light. Any details will be news on launch day and people will pick up whatever little bits they have and run with a story. That's just a natural follow-on from a much hyped launch.

No, if they reported just the facts in an objective manner it would be a story. It's a "story" because the headline was made grossly inaccurate just to make MS look bad. It could just as easily have been titled "Xbox 360 Problems Reported", but then the slashbots would be jumping all over the editors for "buying into the hype machine".

I can only hope that next time someone finds a bug in the Linux kernel the story is entitled "Linux Development Process Fundamentally Flawed", but somehow I doubt this will happen.

The air being exhausted from my xbox 360 doesn't feel any hotter then what's comming out of my PC. I think there probably a larger precentage of defects out there, especialy given the rush to market and short supply. Last night I played for about 6 hours strait didn't experience any lockups or other issues like what has been reported.

I fully anticipated that there would be problems with the initial release of 360s reported from various tech-knowledgable early buyers, but how widespread are these problems in reality?

For example, I have a day-of-release PS2 that's still going strong, and I never experienced any of the problems that were reported here and elsewhere with these units. In this case, I assume that my machine is the norm and not the exception, but if I based my opinion on the naysayers at the time it would appear that my PS2 would be in the minority of working units instead.

I've heard an unconfirmed rumor that Microsoft suspects that the XBox's are crashing because of the proximity of nearby Linux boxes. One employee, using an "open source detector", claimed to have established a 3-mile "Cloud of Evil" around a Red Hat server. The employee went on to say "This conclusively proves that Linux is a danger to our children".
Steve Ballmer's statement (which was taped to a chair and thrown through a newsroom window) blamed Google.

I waited up all night in front of a Best Buy to get mine. I also purchased Project Gotham Racing 3 and Kameo. With both games, I've spent most of my time playing PGR3. I have not had one crash, and the only trace I've seen of it is on Kotaku.

As a note, the system is very thermally unstalbe. I have mine vertical, and every vent is needed. If you were to block any of the airholes for any reason, or to trap the air exiting via the rear of the sytsem, the system potentially could overheat. The exhaust was very high temperature when I checked it after an hour or two of PGR3.

My rig (for reference) was running at 720P for part of it, 1080i for the other part (to compare whose transcoder was better, my TV or the XBOX). I'm on XBOX live, and upon boot, the system updated itself and restarted. This could have been a critical update that fixed the problem that people are talking about.

All and all, I'm quite impressed with the hardware. The emulation works better with some XBOX games than others. For instance, Forza motorsport runs sluggishly on the 360, yet Dead or Alive 3 runs flawlessly.

The live marketplace is impressive. They have HD downloads available, such as music videos and trailers. In addition, you can download new games such as bejewled from Microsoft. There are also themes that can be purchased via live, and as Penny Arcade themes are available, many people should be able to get their themes for sale on Live.

If I see crashes, I'll repost. However, so far, after 10+ hours of operation, most of which with PGR3, I have no crashes or errors to report.

How can you call the XBOX 360 'very unstable', based purely on a couple of sporadic forum posts, by anonymous people with no real media credibility. While I'm certainly not saying they are fake, I am saying some people have an agenda. And frankly, it wouldn't surprise me if some "hyper-ultra anti MS zealots" that frequent this site would do such a thing purely for kicks and a lack of maturity, such is the nature of those with a religeous devotion to something. Also, who says these people havn't opened up the XBOX, had a fiddle, tried some modding etc...

Furthermore, with the exponentially increasing complexity of electronic products these days, it's to be expected that there will be some software bugs that need ironing out. A console as complex as the XBOX 360, with advanced networking features and a system such as Live will of course have some bugs to iron out. Microsoft will replace faulty units, because they wish the XBOX 360 to succeed and public outcry wouldn't be to there advantage.

Finally, When Slashdot posts an article about the XBOX 360 launch, with links to sites effectively praising the console as an excellent product, with respected sites such as [H]ardocp giving it the thumbs up, it's poor journalism to immediately follow up with an instability article with poor sources. Common sense tells me if the XBOX 360 was 'very unstable', sites such as [H]ardOCP and GameSpy who would be testing and evaluating it extensively would also have run into issues, yet I see no mention of this on their sites.

Very unstable? Rubbish. Editors need to be more responsible and ensure articles have an appropriate headline.

The graphics glitches in those screenshots look like what happens when a modern graphics card overheats. For some reason the contents of the video RAM tend to get corrupted (covered with checkerboard blocks or rainbow colors) right before the system halts altogether.

I don't have an Xbox, but maybe you could try running it with the cover off or a fan blowing on it?

Who knows, this could be a result of Microsoft rushing the hardware to make it in time for the holiday season.

In the case of PDZ, I'd question the stability of the game from the fact they were stamping the damn thing before running it through Microsoft's test regime. The problem is with both parties frankly, because if you're stamping it before final testing, the you probably didn't do your OWN testing to make sure things were working properly. Or, I bet Rare was biting its fingernails hoping Microsoft didn't find known issues.

Admittedly, this is version 1 of the 360. You can never find all the problems until a product is put out to market and widespread use finds all sorts of issues you never thought of. For all we know, some people having issues maybe have their 360 plugged into a dizzying array of power bars hooked up behind their home theaters. Power issue, maybe? Inadequate cooling? Time will tell.

In any case, I'm pretty glad I'm not an early adopter this go-around. I'm still considering picking one up, but I think I'll wait until the game library's a little less sports-heavy, and maybe for the 65nm chipped versions to hit the shelves.

This is reason #1 why I'm waiting about a year to buy a 360. For MS to work out most of the big bugs.I can't say I feel sorry for anyone who's experiencing these problems. It's a risk you take when you rush out to buy untested technology. It shouldn't be this way, but its a fact of technology life. If people wouldn't be so quick to go out and buy, maybe companies might start smartening up.

Other reasons include:

-My current X-Box currently still have lots of life left in it.-Prices will go down.-Won't have to stand in line to get one, or go from store to store.-More selection of games.

...who are discovering all the bugs and flaws in this new console. I don't know about others but I really appreciate your services - your willingness to queue up for the box; to pay a premium rate for a revision 1.0A piece of hardware; to choose from a paltry selection of mostly mediocre full-price games; and to gripe that the reality of your purchase might not meet up with your expectations or indeed what the hype lead you to believe.

My XB360 crashed multiple times playing Quake 4. Personally, I think its an over heating issue.

Since the machine is pretty loud I put it in my home-entairtainment cabinet, which it shares with a receiver, DVD player, and an old VHS. While the cabinet is relatively large, when I close the glass door and play the XB360 it gets very hot in there after playing (and I've been playing alot).

Quake 4 seems to really stress the XB360 out since there is an aggrevating amount of slow down in the game. Several times when Quake 4 got too hectic my XB360 froze up on me. After I felt how hot it is I took it out of the cabinet and so far (being since last night) I haven't had any problems with crahes so far.

>>Secondly, as mentioned in my first post the cabinet is relatively large, and my VHS and DVD are obviously turned off when playing my XB360; there is ample space and ventilation in the cabinet, I put it on the shelf where my old Xbox used to sit.

>>Thirdly, MS should obviously design their "home entertainment" device to be put in, well, a "home-enteirtainment" cabinet. Its unresonable to expect every person to use their XB360 in "frozen food section at Safeway" .

It should also be mentioned that even outside the cabinet it's incredible hot. When I eject the DVD to the machine I can feel the heat of radiating from it, and the game is suprising hot to the touch. I've never had this problem with my original Xbox (that sat in the same cabinet), which I also bought on lauch day, and has been incredibly reliable since the day I got it. Personally, I think MS caved into the critism of the size of the original Xbox and stuffed the hardware into too small a place relative to heat disapation.

We're taking components and cramming them in spaces with insufficient free air delivery and we're surprised when they crash and burn.

Consumer electronics should be designed to support consumer use, no?

A consumer should be able to use AV cabinet "A" and AV device "B" the way both were intended. If not, then one thing, the other, or both were poorly designed.

As a consumer, I would expect that any AV cabinet I buy is designed to accommodate or dissipate the heat from several devices consuming several amps each at 120 Volts. As a consumer, I would assume the X360 is designed to operate in reasonable temparture and humidity ranges, and also that it is designed to manage the BTUs it generates during operation. What exactly is wrong with this?

I've lost many hard drives and three computers (one Linux, one Mac and one Windows,) to "heat prostration".

I've owned and operated Macs, Wintel, and Linux boxen for almost 20 years, and I've run them on or under desks, and in closed, poorly ventilated "computer desk" cabinets. Not one has overheated, even the Mac that spent its entire 6 years as my main machine, in the closed cabinet, and had 3-4 HDDs at times.

Sometimes the cases are not really capable of handling everything we can shove in there.

Then why are we able to shove things in there? If there is a valid mounting position for something, the case designer should assume it's going to be used and design accordingly.

I hate the monolith in Redmond as much as the next guy but... heat is the enemy here.

I'm not specificly digging MS here, they just provided a context for the discussion. This is a fundemental design standard that all consumer products should meet, regardless of the product type or manufacturer.

Heat is not an enemy, it's a predictabe condition. In this case, MS could easily tell how many amps the box pulls, and could easily compute the BTUs it would be generating. From there it's a risk management question: What is an acceptable mean failure rate, and how hot can we let it operate before we exceed that rate?

I bet NOBODY who lives in a frozen food section at Safeway is reporting a crash.

And I bet NOBODY considers that a valid consumer electronics operting specification.

What we should be reporting on, what is MORE newsworthy than just the instability, is Microsoft's reaction to it. If and when they find the problem, will they replace defective units? It's usually at times like these that a company shows its true committment to its customers and product.
As an example, when the iMac flat panel line first came out there were lots of customers complaining of fan noise, and Apple was quick to figure out what was causing it and send out replacement parts to affected users. My first Mac was an iMac with such a problem, and their reaction to the problem was entirely reassuring to someone who bought in on a 1.0 version of a product.
I'm definitely going to be keeping an eye on the news of these issues to see what kind of support is there for people.

This story was created, or at least hyped, by retailers to convince us to by extended warranties. I can hear the blue shirted dweebs now, "Oh man you've GOT to buy the warranty. Haven't you heard?! These things are crashing right and left!"

IBM's PPC970 is known to produce vast quantities of heat, particularly with three cores. And ATI's modern GPUs are hot potatoes as well - particularly when you consider that the ATI GPU in the XBOX is also serving as the northbridge.

By all accounts, the system produces ~180W of heat while playing games. That's a lot to handle with only two 60mm fans.

Microsoft is not alone with this problem - the PS3 has an NVIDIA GeForce 7800GTX derivitive that is clocked very high; it will produce at least 80W, and Cell will likely produce ~80W. More problematic for Sony is the fact that the current PS3 case has very few vent holes.

Make no mistake - heat is an issue that will be problematic for all next generation consoles. The days of 25W desktop CPUs are over, as are the days of 30W performance GPUs.

I'm just surprised that no one was smart enough to put a bloody Sempron in one of these consoles...

My XBOX 360 was waiting for me when I got home from work last night. I had pre-ordered from EBGames.com and selected next day air shipping. My first 5 hours with the machine were not as smooth as I had hoped.

After getting the old Xbox out of the way and hooking up the component cables, surround sound optical cable, wireless adapter, and ginormous power brick, the first thing I saw on the screen turning it on was an error screen. Black, with E74 in the center bottom - there was some other text as well, but I don't remember what it said and most of it was in another language. Not a great first impression, to say the least. I think the problem was the wireless adapter - I was using the one I bought for my original Xbox. I guess they don't play nice together. I'm not sure why really, I thought it was pretty much equivalent to a wireless bridge. Starting up the console without it plugged in resulted in the startup screen. A big error screen is a pretty harsh welcome - they could have at least set it up to start up the system as normal and then display a friendly error message about having to pony up more money for new accessories: "Sorry. Although your shiny new Xbox 360 might be able to play over 200 legacy Xbox games, the wireless adapter you bought is now just a paperweight with lights." That would be better than E74.

After getting the Xbox on finally, I discovered that turning on the controller is less than intuitive. Batteries are included, and simple enough to insert. There is a nice sticker with the finger-pointing-hand icon pointing right at the Xbox 360 semisphere button. The message was clear enough: "Press this button to make this thing work." Nope. I pressed it. I pressed it again. Nothing. I unwrapped the second controller that EBGames so kindly packaged for me, and had the same result. Those damned things wouldn't turn on - no lights, no nothing. It was several minutes before I discovered that you need to hold the button down for several seconds before controller will turn on. I even resorted to RTFM, and still didn't find this crucial tidbit of info. That sucked for a while.

Played PD0 first - no real issues. When I first inserted Project Gotham Racing, however, I saw a nice error screen that told that in order to play this game I must insert it into a Xbox 360 console. I thought that was what I did, but I ejected it and inserted it again just in case. It played the second time around, but when I was done and ready to try out Call of Duty 2, the Xbox 360 just went to a black screen, not the dashboard. Inserting a new disc did nothing - I tried all 4 of them. I had to turn the console off and back on again before it would recognize a game. What the hell? I felt like blowing on the disc and in the tray for old time's sake.

I could gripe a bit about how counterintuitive it is to get a second player to join in games, but I'll chalk that up to my lack of experience with the new interface...

After wading through most of the nonesense, I had a pretty good time my first night with the new system, but damn was it a rough start. The games are pretty fun (PDZ, PGR3, CoD2, Kameo), but at no time did I feel completely blown away by the graphics or the gameplay. Kameo is probably the best of the bunch. I fully expect to encounter more glitches, but there is little chance that I'll send the system away for repairs at this point when most people can't even get their hands on one until next year. That would just be insensitive.

If this is a big hardware problem I feel bad for the developers who had to work long hours to get their product ready for launch date.

hmmm..

DANTE: All right, so even if independent contractors are working on the Death Star, why are you uneasy with its destruction?

RANDALL: All those innocent contractors hired to do a job were killed--casualties of a war they had nothing to do with. (notices Dante's confusion) All right, look--you're a roofer, and some juicy government contract comes your way; you got the wife and kids and the two-story in suburbia--this is a government contract, which means all sorts of benefits. All of a sudden these left-wing militants blast you with lasers and wipe out everyone within a three-mile radius. You didn't ask for that. You have no personal politics. You're just trying to scrape out a living.

BLUE-COLLAR MAN: Excuse me. I don't mean to interrupt, but what were you talking about?

RANDALL: The ending of Return of the Jedi.

DANTE: My friend is trying to convince me that any contractors working on the uncompleted Death Star were innocent victims when the space station was destroyed by the rebels.

BLUE-COLLAR MAN: Well, I'm a contractor myself. I'm a roofer...(digs into pocket and produces business card) Dunn and Reddy Home improvements. And speaking as a roofer, I can say that a roofer's personal politics come heavily into play when choosing jobs.

RANDALL: Like when?

BLUE-COLLAR MAN: Three months ago I was offered a job up in the hills. A beautiful house with tons of property. It was a simple reshingling job, but I was told that if it was finished within a day, my price would be doubled. Then I realized whose house it was.

DANTE: Whose house was it?

BLUE-COLLAR MAN: Dominick Bambino's.

RANDALL: "Babyface" Bambino? The gangster?

BLUE-COLLAR MAN: The same. The money was right, but the risk was too big. I knew who he was, and based on that, I passed the job on to a friend of mine.

DANTE: Based on personal politics.

BLUE-COLLAR MAN: Right. And that week, the Foresci family put a hit on Babyface's house. My friend was shot and killed. He wasn't even finished shingling.

RANDALL: No way!

BLUE-COLLAR MAN: (paying Dante for coffee) I'm alive because I knew there were risks involved taking on that particular client. My friend wasn't so lucky. (pauses to reflect) You know, any contractor willing to work on that Death Star knew the risks. If they were killed, it was their own fault. A roofer listens to this...(taps his heart) not his wallet.

It does seem to be a hardware problem - they crash screen look glitchy instead of the "clean" screen you get when the crash is OS related. Reminds me of and overheated GPU.

Now, i don't know if the headline is correct (the console is very unstable... but only for a bunch of people), but if true, it has the smell of a rushed product all over it. And i won't make any friends over this, but serves these people right. Yeah, you, the ones that couldn't wait a couple of months and pay 3x the price in order to buy a product before it has been properly reviewed. And i don't mean like Gamespot's "Oooh! It's the second coming of Christ"-kind of reviews.

Paying upfront for promises is bad buisness. Don't buy into the hype. It's only a console.

The information at some of the links indicates it might be a problem with the power supply brick - one poster had three 360s (his and two friends')... one had a very different (color, size, prong size) power cord. That power cord, whichever xbox it was plugged into, wouldn't have a problem.

Sounds like its likely a combination of out-of-spec power conditioning and overheating. The two can reinforce each other AND combine to contribute instability... parts that are hot are less likely to be tolerant to poor power conditioning, and parts that are experiencing power fluctuations tend to produce more heat on the surge cycles.

Either way, you can be sure that Microsoft (or any console maker) will set their launch date a full year ahead of what would be needed to ensure a quality product. They figure (quite correctly, unless the crashes are very frequent to the point of making the console unplayable) that the extremely image conscious video game market will reward speed to market over quality. Personally I will be opting out of the latest set of console releases. I don't have enough time to make use of a new console purchase and I'm either boycotting the console maker (Sony and Microsoft), or I hold the maker in very low esteem (Nintendo, for bringing us Pokemon and thus refining price gouging and bringing marketing to a new level). $400/unit isn't exactly a bargain basement price. I'm also paranoid about anything with wireless networking (that it'll have FBI or general purpose backdoors), so that's another strike. None of these corps would even think twice about installing backdoors (Microsoft and Sony have been doing this for years, and I don't see Nintendo as a bastion of consumer rights).

... You know they won't. The problem with today's software (and combined hardware/software) manufacturers and vendors has nothing to do with the programmers themselves. Companies have simply responded to the paying public's demand for new toys with no wait. We want our toys NOW, not later. And buying trends for YEARS now have indicated that computer and computer program buyers are more then willing to purchase a program and then spend a significant amout of time patching and updating it- often right out of the box.

Microsoft responded to this in the way that gained them the most extra profit- they rushed the system to market without (apparently enough) random batch testing or other beta testing. People (lots and lots of people) bought the systems. They are crashing. Microsoft will now start to release patches (probably over Live) that correct this bug or that. The paying public will accept this and install them. People who buy XBox 360s down the road will expect the patches to be installed before they buy the system- but they'll still expect to have to install more at some point.

It's NOT the computer companies fault things have grown this way. They- like all companies- are a FOR-PROFIT venture, and will do whatever they think is the thing that will garner them the most profit. Period.

They are crashing. Microsoft will now start to release patches (probably over Live) that correct this bug or that. The paying public will accept this and install them. People who buy XBox 360s down the road will expect the patches to be installed before they buy the system- but they'll still expect to have to install more at some point.

I'm curious how Microsoft plans to patch the systems without hard drives. Aside from updates to the BIOS, how can changes to the video games be saved?

You're (potentially inadvertantly) equivocating profit with value. They are not necessarily the same thing. If a public company is required to make a good faith effort to increase shareholder value, such things as reputation and integrity can be more important for the long-term success/value of the company than near-term profit.

Regardless of Microsoft's "plans", they will find that the consumer elecronics business is _not as easy to dominate as the arena of PC software. Their biggest competitor (Sony) is a veteran of consumer electronics and is having all sorts of financial problems -- ironically, people point to the Playstation division as Sony's sole saving grace. In fact, Microsoft is already finding out because J.Allard's original plan was for the Xbox1 to be turning at least a tiny profit by this point. Instead, they dumped a bunch of money into a new design and rushed it to market.

If this Xbox360 crashing problem is widespread enough, these things are going to either be shunned by the market, or lose all their profit potential fixing them.

We whine when they delay and push back release dates of their OS over and over again but when they finally do come out with something "on time" (whatever that means) and it's not up to par we give them shit.

So they can't win. Everyone knew that already but seriously it's not going to cost them anything.

Consider their "limited release numbers" early adoption beta testing. They got them out there into the real world without having to give the units away and now they are getting the feedback they need to add to the new "revisions" that will still be out before the PS3.

It's a good thing though, the *only* reason I could ever see purchasing an XBox with Live would be for racing online. Now that I can't do that I might as well wait for Gran Turismo 5 on the PS3 w/o network play;)

But give how common these problems are, doesn't it strike you as odd? This is almost like there was no testing at all, which doesn't make sense. The developers surely would have caught these weeks, if not months ago.

We whine when they delay and push back release dates of their OS over and over again but when they finally do come out with something "on time" (whatever that means) and it's not up to par we give them shit.

So they can't win....

Ahh, but they can win...it's called proper project management.

Delays can and do occur, but to be years off target is inexcusible. Rushing a product to market to meet the project deadline is also inexcusible. Microsoft has way too much experience in software development to not be able to estimate how long a project will take. When projects are chronically late by significant anounts of time, your means of estimating time to complete projects needs to be re-examined.

Longhorn is estaimated to ship when, 2008 is it? This is several years behind schedule? (I don't know for certain.) Microsoft's project manager knew (or whould have known) what was going into the new OS and the developers should have been better prepared to provide a more reasonable estimate of the time needed to complete the project.

Of course, the MS Marketing Dept. may be setting timelines and not the engineering/R&D department....no shock there.

Perhaps you could share with us your incredibly accurate estimation technique? I'm sure many of us would love to know how you've solved a problem that no-one else in the business has managed to solve effectively for years.

Seriously, estimation is hard. I'm sure you know that really. The best development shops I've worked for deal with this problem by having plans that can adapt to unexpected delays, including putting back the shipping date if necessary. Perhaps we're lucky; for some projects, that simply isn't an option. But it's a lot better than pretending you can estimate a project that's going to take hundreds of man-years accurately ahead of time, and then betting your business on being able to make your predicted shipping date.

They could give us a correct estimate of how long it will take them to actually do the job correctly. Or better yet, not talk about their new product until it's actually out the door, which IBM had to do for a long time under their consent decree with the DOJ, since they used to regularly abuse their monopoly power in the mainframe market by claiming their new mainframe would have millions of new features that their competitors never even dreamed of and would be out in just one more year. So naturally everyone would hold off their IT purchasing for another year. Then IBM would push the release date back or release a product with far fewer features than they originally said they would. That was the original anti-competitive practise that IBM invented. Yes, Microsoft can't even be innovative in business process.

Of course, they've also shown that they can win with their anti-competitive practises. Too bad there's not some sort of legal entity that will call them on it...

First, I would be curious to know what percentage of XBOX 360s have this issue? I ask this because only people having issues make any noise, with the rest spending too many hours playing with their new system.

One thing that is worth sharing is the answer 'makaveli87' (post #79 in the Xbox Forums [teamxbox.com]) gave about his contact with MS Support:

"Ok I phoned tech support, I was on hold for about 40min. The first guy didn't really know what he was talking about, he kept trying to tell me to do things I had already tried like unplug everything or "read the manual" so he connected me to someone else. This guy seemed like a gamer or he at least knew what he was talking about. He told me that they were having several problems with the launch consoles, the hdd problem, overheating, something to do with the HD to SDTV thing on the back, game disks being scratched , problems with the operating system and a few disk read errors.He said the overheating problem will be the most common and that this is what I have. (If your console turns off or the screen freezes 90% of the time its an over heating issue. If you get one of the error screens its and OS problem.) he said for both of these problems they need to replace the console and that it would take 6-10 weeks!!! I asked why and he said that they are experiencing more problems then hey had hoped and that he is supposed to say 6-8 weeks, but last week he was telling people 4-6 and those people would be waiting until mid-january. He wouldn't go further into that though. He did tell me that I could hold onto the system and use it as much as I can for 2 or 3 weeks, send it in then and I would still get it back 6-10 weeks from now.Anyways the warranty covers any of those major problems I stated above so that's good. I guess #1 on MS list is to sell all of their consoles to new customers and let the people with problematic ones wait until after the holidays."

The XBOX shipped with (no less than 3) critical flaws in its BIOS, allowing unsigned code to be ran provided that it was given the OK from signed media (I.E. Mechassault, SplinterCell, 007). Perhaps they will write cleaner code next time?

You're combining things here. There were 3 flaws in the boot code. This is MS' fault.

That has nothing to do with the overflows in those games. Unless MS wrote those games, they aren't responsible, unless they're auditing the code before signing it.

well, TFA has the actual gathered facts. this reflects what we've been hearing about the x360 kiosks that were installed in walmarts as well. whereas those crashes were written off as the byproduct of improper ventilation in the kiosks and the models being alpha-development hardware, now we are starting to see those werent just early prototypes; those are the same models that are being sold now. remember the whole "the actual power supply wont actually be that big..." argument? well, guess what? IT IS... remember the whole "the final model wont be as noisy..." argument? well it is. what else is there to be said? the crashes arent isolated to one or two software titles; it must be in the hardware somewhere.

this sort of stuff happens with lots of rushed to market consumer electronics. no big deal to me; its what you would expect. all i can say is that ive had my fair share of consoles do weird stuff, but no playstation or nintendo product ive ever owned has repeatedly crashed on me within the first 24 hours of owning it.

the postings are on xbox-scene. if they are biased against microsoft, i cant tell. its an xbox modding/fan site! would multiple users go out and spend $400 plus games, peripherals, etc. on x360s just so they can post screenshots of self-inflicted crashes?